The level of traffic that is routed over the public switched network is increasing at an appreciable rate, and is now straining the call processing and termination capacity of the various switches that form the network. Moreover, it is likely that the capacity of even the largest of such switches will be exhausted in the next decade due to the ever increasing levels of traffic. This problem could be addressed by building switches having a level of call processing and call termination capacity that is sufficiently large to deal with current as well as future levels of network traffic. However, the development and manufacture of such a large switch could be very expensive.
Alternatively, switches could be added to the network as needed to handle increasing levels of network traffic. However, since the switches forming a telecommunications network require a high degree of connectivity to minimize multihop routing and call processing as i shown in FIG. 1, then each switch that is thereafter added to the network to meet increasing traffic demands would have to be connected to many or all of the other switches in the network via respective trunks groups. For such full direct connectivity, the number of such trunk groups would equal the number of switches already in the network. Also, routing and translation tables at each of the existing network switches would need to be updated to account for the newly added switch. It may also be necessary to rehome a large number of toll connect trunks if the associated network happened to be a so-called interexchange carrier (IXC) network. It is thus apparent that adding switches to a network as they are needed would also prove out to be very expensive.